Religion for Atheists is the latest in de Botton’s prolific portfolio of thought, including the excellent The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Essays in Love, and The Consolations of Philosophy.T he novels of Graham Greene are full of reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of God but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction. And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition.” Sample the book with de Botton’s compelling talk from TED Global 2011:Ī sermon wants to change your life, and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed.” And secondly, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: firstly, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting. Particularly noteworthy are de Botton’s insights on what education and the arts can borrow from the formats and paradigms of religious delivery, from why the sermon is more effective than the lecture to how engineering visceral encounters can help draw power from art. In a world beset by fundamentalists of both religious and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.” One can be left cold by the doctrines of the Christian Trinity and the Buddhist Eightfold path and yet at the same time be interested in the ways in which religions deliver sermons, promote morality, engender a spirit of community, inspire travels, train minds and inspire gratitude at the beauty of spring. That’s the premise behind Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion ( public library), a provocative and thoughtful new book by modern philosopher, prolific author, and School of Life founder Alain de Botton, who recently made a passionate case for redefining success. But if we can divorce the medium from the message, there might be some powerful communication lessons secular movements could learn from religious ones. The tension between secularity and religion has endured for centuries, infusing academia and science with a strong and permeating undercurrent of atheism.

Alain de botton religion for atheist